1stDibs curator and artist Metageist, along with artists Process Smith and Ogi in London, England, take us through the process of creating non-fungible tokens through VR and discuss the future of digital art.
As the NFT market continues to burgeon, our inaugural exhibition is a vigorous effort to enter what guest curator Lee Mason describes as “the portal into the future.” “Portals: Art on the Threshold” presents a host of artists and designers from across the metaverse, ready to share their story-driven work with a broader audience. Together, these creators exemplify the diversity of skills, mediums and content this community offers and demonstrate the breadth of quality work available.
The exhibition explores the concept of the portal as a door into another realm, whether real or imagined. The creators included what Mason characterizes as “the interplay between real and digital art, wherein their work is real conceptually but not real, as in not matter.” NFTs and blockchain technology are beginning to transform the contemporary art world, particularly for artists and collectors. The future of art hinges on their stepping into a dawning digital space with new technology, communities and systems and firmly accepting this new reality.
“Portals” includes the artwork of Metageist (also known as Lee Mason) along with the following creators: Lucas Aguirre, A. L. Crego, Isa Kost, Marc-O-Matic, mvhvma, Ogi, Process Smith, blackboxdotart and Rosie Summers. Each piece or series examines the hypnotic experience of crossing over into another reality and depicts distinct occurrences – often confined by time and space – to help convey the phenomenon of transportation.
A.L. Crego
Spanish artist A.L. Crego produces GIFs, continuously looped, that animate black and white lines and dots to evoke conceptual presence. The NFT series included in “Portals” opens with Doubt, in which the artist illustrates through spatial contrast the organic and inevitable formation of a portal. As the artist describes it: “Two opposite ideas meet. Two different prisms filter the same light. Two different beings orbit the same concept.” The portal then opens, in Dialogue and Question, into a void of vibrating white lines, where two circular rings spiral and meet in the middle. Resolution of the dialectical struggle, illustrated in Inference, creates a new form of entry. Crego’s earlier GIFs, inspired by Surrealism and chiaroscuro modeling, gained popularity on social media and continue to influence his work today.
Marc-O-Matic
Marc-O-Matic, who describes himself as a “mixed-reality artist and storyteller,” presents three sequential NFTs that illustrate the definitive purpose of the eye and, by extension, perception. Applying VR technology to ink illustrations, the artist represents the making of an eyeball as a machine operation. In Reality Diagnostics, engineers inspect and examine a pair of eyes. Once inserted into a skull, as The Beholder Complex shows, they blast out beams of light, dimming once they are removed. The piece is a firm declaration from the artist that “eyes are not the window to the soul” but instead a means to diagnose reality that reveals the subject of the anti-portal. Finally, in The Beholder Component, the eye acts not as a portal but as a cog in the machine of consciousness and a tool only for cognitive illumination.
blackboxdotart
Blackboxdotart, a veteran cryptoartist with a background in fine arts, unlocks the internal world of emotions in her latest NFT series. Influenced by the painting medium, the artist uses stark, primary colors, starting with Red, to capture specific emotional moments. Green, for example, depicts a figure in a blurry green landscape that could, to the imagination, represent a flashlight in the forest or a lighthouse by the sea. Because of the haziness of recall, the images can only elicit an emotional response before reason or taxonomy. Key sections of the images are subtly animated – a progressing foreground or a constant flickering light – while the rest remains still. By contrasting bright colors and strategic animation, the artist exposes the portal of emotional memory and its profound ability to fill in an incomplete picture.
Ogi
“World creator” Ogi focuses on crafting meta-narratives in his work and forging new pathways for imagination and communication in the metaverse. In short film animations, a vast 3D bust composed of flickering alloy molecules spins slowly in showcase fashion. Chorismos, the first video in the set, has a sleek futuristic feel, depicting machines whose interior resembles the dark walls of a techno club as robots move rhythmically to the film’s score. The bust, or godhead, floating above undisclosed rocky terrain, deposits techne capillaries into a cyber cauldron at the base of the vertical. In what the artist terms an “AI fever dream,” the vibrating energy of music and dance activates a mechanized transfer of seeds (ideas) into a pod (the mind) to birth an algorhythm (technology) and open the portal of innovation.
Rosie Summers
Virtual reality artist Rosie Summers creates hybrid 3D worlds for the human body to experience sensorially. Employing augmented technologies, such as a headset and handheld sensors, Summers uses space as a canvas and “paints” digital landscapes by gesturing shapes and forms with her physical arms, legs, and torso. i|I, her work featured in the exhibition depicts a woman and a faint female figure facing – although not seeing – each other. Between them, an orb of light splits the space between them, each figure reaching toward her side of this portal. Their faces are filled with expressions of wonder and intrigue. The encounter between the two female figures conveys that the physical self and the virtual self can access each other only through the vacuum of the internet.
mvhvma
Through close encounters between loved ones, mvhvma, also known as Mahima Chaudhury, portrays romantic love as a vehicle for traveling to other worlds. Muted pastel colors are rendered with light opacity in the image, and buoyant curves line the sky and the atmosphere. Sketch-like scenes also give a soft, ethereal backdrop to otherwise colorless figures enacting the part of lovers. Touching, kissing and dancing transport the subjects into another reality. mvhvma, in her latest collection of NFTs, continues illustrating love’s transformative ability to facilitate a sweet escape through the portal.
Lucas Aguirre
Argentinian digital artist Lucas Aguirre has adopted the painstaking practice of combining clipped 3D scans with VR sculpture and painting to produce his piece in the show. In Ubicua, fragments of patterned floors and bed sheets, along with abstract metallized waves, float across the foreground and crash together like a gray-scale mosaic or nebulous dream. A repeated snippet of a sleeping figure weaves back and forth through the animation. As it concludes, the fragments vanish, and the figure situated at each corner dominates the picture plane. Aguirre invites viewers to peek inside the otherworldly realm of dreams while conscious, if only for 30 seconds.
Metageist
Metageist, a UK-based cryptoartist, collector and curator, explores the mesmerizing appeal of the metaverse in his work. “Is the metaverse hypnotizing us and pulling us in against our better judgement?” he asks. “What do we leave behind when we climb up into the trap? Is there any way out once you fall down the rabbit hole?”
The artist’s latest NFT collection, “Vortex and Veil,” comprises digital installations — hand-sculpted inside VR — of animated portals bordered by seductively decorated entrances with neon tendrils curling and gripping their side like creeping vines or carnivorous plants. In the Sarracenia Vortex, dizzying animations flash red and yellow, while synchronized white spirals spin and radiate out toward the portal’s edge. As the spinning patterns become more intricate, they suddenly disappear into the ether, and the graphic fades to black. The viewer has been pulled into a mysterious space with no escape.
According to Metageist, The Flickering Veil represents entering the metaverse as a one-way portal to disappear into completely. “Walk through the Veil,” he has written, “and it will burn all your tokens, reset your avatar to default and delete your entire digital identity.”
Isa Kost
Isa Kost is an artist, illustrator and graphic designer who lives and works in Milan. Kost creates illustrations that center the natural world and explore the interchangeably close relationships between animals, plants and the human body. Recent work by the artist relates the four seasons (spring, summer, fall and winter) to other transitional events in nature. In each of the illustrations featured in the show, the familiar lines of the nervous system run through a human head, resembling the branches of a tree. Birds perched on the branches even light up like brain synapses. A simple truth is conveyed: that all of nature must enter new seasons and experience other temporal realities. Kost’s NFTs offer a refreshing reminder of natural beauty while in the metaverse.
Process Smith
Influenced by graffiti and skateboarding, Process Smith designs anthropomorphic totems that embody qualities of a selected theme or vision. The artist uses bold color, dynamic lines and carefully selected expressions to convey the spirit behind impassioned statements. The titles On the Threshold and Welcome to the Future signal the emerging belief that the future of art lies in the NFT space. Fundamentally, the process of minting sets this practice in a domain beyond the physical world and its conventions. Smith further blurs physical reality by incorporating his artist signature into the totems and inserting himself into work that identifies with the coming era of NFTs.
